Bust of William of Orange (1533-1584)

Entry

This gold- or bronze-painted terracotta portrait bust of William of Orange (1533-1584), Father of the Dutch Republic, was likely once held in the possession of the stadholders. Still preserved in the Nationale Konst-Gallery at Huis ten Bosch in The Hague in 1801, the bust is perhaps the sole remnant of a series of dynastic portraits described in the years 1757-59 as 10 gebronste borstbeelden, verbeeldende de famielje van Orange (ten bronzed busts, portraying the family of Orange).⁷

The bust is a derivative of the bronze statue of the prince on his tomb monument in the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft, designed and built by the Amsterdam municipal sculptor and architect Hendrick de Keyser I (1565-1621) and his workshop in the years 1613 to 1622. On the monument, the prince is depicted sitting frontally, dressed as a military commander wearing armour of state. The bust is virtually an exact copy of the bronze portrait of the seated prince on the Delft tomb monument, with the sole deviations being the remodelled sash draped across the breast and the upper torso’s termination at the bottom, in a manner characteristic of De Keyser: an inward-scrolling volute. De Keyser derived the terracotta directly from the casting model required to produce the seated prince. The bronze – and accordingly the casting model – would have been produced at about the same time, circa 1618-19. The existence of different versions of De Keyser’s works attest to the sculptor’s proficiency in working with casting models. Exemplary of this practice are three identical small, bronze portraits of William of Orange (cf. BK-2018-129) cast directly from the terracotta scale model of the deceased prince, today preserved in the Rijksmuseum (BK-AM-37).⁸

For the present bust, the sculptor is certain to have relied on clay or wax studies of the prince’s face made during his preparations for the bronze sculpture on the funeral monument. De Keyser presumably based these posthumous portrait studies – by this time, the prince had been dead for more than thirty years – on painted and drawn portraits, or perhaps even a cast of the death mask. To make his portrait, the sculptor would simply have made a negative mould of such studies, which he could use to press-mould and model the current bust.

De Keyser typically created his sculptures by making and assembling individual parts. A restoration of the present bust portrait of the prince in 1995 revealed that the head had been modelled and fired separately from the upper torso, with the two pieces subsequently joined by a cow bone – specifically, a metarsus (finger) from the hind leg – functioning as a dowel. The composite was then fully embedded in plaster, ensuring the two pieces were held firmly in place. One other technical point of interest that came to light during the restoration was that the head itself was likewise composed of two separate parts: the face and the back of the head form two halves held together with plaster. The vertical join, measuring several millimetres across, was filled with plaster and entirely concealed beneath the layer of paint applied to the bust’s surface.⁹

A second surviving, almost exact copy of the prince’s bust executed in gilded terracotta suggests that De Keyser and his workshop reproduced these portraits in various editions using a mould. This second bust, with its head slightly turned left, is today preserved at the Mauritshuis in The Hague.¹⁰ A third piece – in this case, only the front half of the head – confirms the use of moulds in the De Keyser workshop. The back of this ‘half portrait’ (BK-NM-1423) – held in the Rijksmuseum’s collection – bears the traces that typically arise when pressing wet clay into a mould. One entry in the testament of the sculptor’s widow, drawn up on 15 November 1621, cites a conterfeytsele van zijn Exc[ellent]ie den prince van Oraignen h[oogloffelijcker] m[emorie] (portrait of his Excellency the Prince of Orange’s highly commendable memory), probably referring to another version of this bust or portrait.¹¹ Certainly after the completion of the tomb monument in Delft in 1622, a veritable trade in Orange memorabilia very likely flourished. A full size nineteenth century marble pastiche of the bust surfaced on the Paris art market in 2022.¹²

Frits Scholten, 2024